kengoa
Joined 5 years ago
Karma
107
Submissions
35
Member since
Jun 18
https://kengoa.github.io
View on Hacker NewsRecent submissions
Comment · 7 months ago
Nice list! I remember HN talking about https://students.brown.edu/seeing-theory/ when it came out but sadly it seems like this website was discomissioned.
Added an entry for my data visualisation tool here: https://github.com/stared/interactive-machine-learning-list/....
Edit: found an updated link for seeing theory so I fixed it in the PR above. Feel free to cherry-pick if #24 is not relevant.
Comment · 8 months ago
Amazing work! Reminded me of LLM Visualization (https://bbycroft.net/llm) except this is a lot easier to wrap my head around and that I can actually run the training loops, which makes sense given the simplicity of the original microgpt.
To give a sense of what the loss value means, maybe you can add a small explainer section as a question and add this explanation from Karpathy’s blog:
> Over 1,000 steps the loss decreases from around 3.3 (random guessing among 27 tokens: −log(1/27)≈3.3) down to around 2.37.
to reiterate that the model is being trained to predict the next token out of 27 possible tokens and is now doing better than the baseline of random guess.
Comment · 10 months ago
Understanding Python's data model helped me become a better software engineer.
I'd recommend watching this PyData talk (James Powell: So you want to be a Python expert? | PyData Seattle 2017 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKPlPJyQrt4) and then using the official doc as a reference which is also fun to read: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html
Comment · 11 months ago
> Consequently, knowledge bottlenecks are a form of operational inefficiency in startups.
This resonates with my startup experience, especially when the organisation is growing rapidly (which is almost always the case for VC-funded startups)
Comment · 1 year ago
I ended up making my app installable as a PWA based on this conversation myself. Changes were straightfoward to add on top of a Vite + React application: https://github.com/visprex/visprex/pull/62/files
Comment · 1 year ago
Yes as dimava commented above a PWA would be a great alternative.
> in a way it can be more honest for a developer with any commercial intentions to not open source something while offering paid ways to modify the source code
I appreciate that you made your commercial intentions clear in the comments and I agree that you don't want to walk back your license as it definitely leads to backlash. I think developers (i.e. people on HN) tend to trust open-core models more where there's a clear separation between the core open-source components and a paid offering but I guess you don't have to overindex on those given the general audience of this tool.
I don't know what your ultimate monetization goal is, but in my opinion one realistic path is an one-time only payment of some reasonable amount with the full feature as opposed to subscription (I saw your Stripe link in the source).
Comment · 1 year ago
Great project! I'm also maintaining a fully in-browser data visualisation/analytics tool [1] and I often found it hard to convince people that their data isn't sent anywhere. It's funny I also say the exact same thing that they can inspect the Network tab. As a potential alternative to open-sourcing the codebase, maybe a desktop version of the same tool (i.e. an Electron app) could help address the privacy concerns if it explicitly states that it won't make network calls, although it's a perception problem rather than a technical one.
Comment · 1 year ago
Very interesting read, I wish more startups did postmortems like this. It seems like the authors managed to build a set of tools that provided real value that ultimately did not make commercial sense, but would've been interesting to see if this learning:
> Scout was our most-used product. Its users weren’t our target market, but some were. We had vague ambitions to use it as an inbound marketing tool, but we never capitalised on it. This was a missed opportunity.
was applicable in a conservative industry like real estate and government as lots of open-core companies operate on this model (e.g. free open-source software and marked-up hosted solutions).
Comment · 1 year ago
I encountered it during my masters in 2019 and it still remains my favourite textbook to this day.
Comment · 1 year ago
> That year, I lost about thirty pounds due not having enough money for food. It was in this context that the lab’s principal investigator told me that his funding for my position was running out. Desperate for work, I applied for a job as a web producer and decided to learn to code. My thinking was that it was a stepping stone towards any sort of scientific career, and it would be possible without more formal education or debt. In hindsight, this was the right move, but at the time, it felt like the only move.
This reminded me of the summer when I accidentally landed my first programming gig at my friend's startup as a part-time web developer during university. I was running out of money for food as my research assistant role was unpaid and I asked around for some odd jobs in the city. As a non-CS major, all I had was data analysis skills in Python but my friend thought I was was good enough to help him out with his SaaS startup, and I ended up learning a lot on software engineering principles on that job.
Comment · 1 year ago
Nice visualisation! Some entities seem to have "undefined" on the graph that you might want to double check.
Comment · 2 years ago
Yes now I'm looking at the tests I can see that the coverage won't increase linearly, but 12% (with some of the hard parts) in two weeks is impressive. I starred the repo, good luck with your journey :)